Time, Like a River Bending
Friday, April 04, 2008
 III.4.1.
And we're back, almost a week past April Fools' Day and I'm still feeling foolish. I guess it takes a while for that kind of thing to wear off.
This week we've gone to our ancient, antique photo file for our images.
That's a crock. I didn't do any such thing, I'm just playing with some more of the new buttons on Photobucket.
On with the show.

I'm starting this week with haiku by Matsuo Basho, master of that form. Basho was born near the mid-17th century, son of a samurai, and died just two years before the 18th. He lived an active life, at some points doubting his desires to be a poet.
The problem with using these short poems is that it's hard to stop once I get started. I'll decide to use 10, then discover I've already selected 25.
But I'll be firm this time. Here are 10, and no more than 10, classic haiku, each one like a cold water creek in the morning. They are from The Sound of Water, selected and translated by Sam Hamill
At the ancient pond a frog plunges into the sound of water
*****
Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die
*****
Seen in plain daylight the firefly's nothing but an insect
*****
A cuckoo cries, and through a thicket of bamboo the late moon shines
*****
This hot day swept away into the sea by the Mogami River
*****
With plum blossom scent, this sudden sun emerges along a mountain trail
*****
Wrapping dumplings in bamboo leaves, with one finger she tidies her hair
*****
This dark autumn old age settles down on me like heavy clouds or birds
*****
On Buddha's birthday a spotted fawn is born - just like that
*****
Through frozen rice fields, moving slowly on horseback, my shadow creeps by

I'm still working out of my art book, finding some interesting work that leads me, sometimes somewhere good, sometimes not. Most of the poems I'm coming up with in response to the paintings are pretty dark. I don't know if that's because the source material is dark or if it's just my state of mind responding.
Anway, this one is dark, darker, I think, than the painting that inspired it. To see the painting, go here:
http://www.rare-gallery.com/artists/JeanRoy/index.html
grandeur (after Jean-Pierre Roy's "The Defeat of Anthropy" - oil on canvas)
fragile are the fruits of our labor pointless our ambitions
we are a mote adrift on a passing sunbeam in the crowded corridors of time
our grandest monuments will weaken and collapse of their inherent fragility as will we
we dream and then we rot
that is our story

I have a couple of Texas poets this week. The first one James Hoggard is a poet, translator, essayist and novelist. The author of twelve books, he has published two collections of his translations of poems by Oscar Hahn: The Art of Dying and Love Breaks. His most recent books are Alone Against The Sea: Poems From Cuba By Raul Mesa and the novel Trotter Ross.
He is the McMurtry Distinguished Professor of English Chair at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. He was named co-winner of the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for literary translation in 1999 for Alone Against The Sea.
The poem I chose is the title poem from his book Breaking an Indelicate Statue, published by Latitudes Press in 1986.
Breaking an Indelicate Statue
Our nontouch lust chisels the shapes of all that I am talking of, but I feel more than lust. I have for you a roudh deepshadowed love, just now confessed. Mosaic law forbids it, but not my peace of mind, for consciene is but shadow of a rock.
Times times times I've gone by where you sleep and felt the bodypull of brainlove that grows enormous in the length of all that you are: distance that falls like stone, static that sparks alive the hem on your thighs where your razor has never yet shaved.
There is more than one stopping point we strain against in making light our heavy fight against the bounds n which our motions go. There is clothing and prudence of speech, eyes that flash then dilate in restraint, like matchflames frozen by a wild heatpromis,
and hands that keep to themselves pretty much of damnably all of the time, and words too judicious to grab your shoulders - so the hairlines above your knees are only one stopping point, but I keep hacking north of that line to your soul-brainlusting
for the rhythms of our skin and its wild yet articulate speech.

Here's a poem by Don Schaeffer.
Don holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from City University of New York (1975) and lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba with his wife, Joyce. His first book of poetry, Almost Full, was published by Owl Oak Press early in the summer of 2006.
He has a way with his short poems of leaving some mystery, as well as creative room to develop your own elaborations. This one I especially like.
It Is A Comfort
that at least something remains.
When she listens to country tunes she doesn't dance but struts shoulders even and eyes level like a gentleman of the South.

My next Texas poet is Chip Dameron.
Dameron's work has appeared in numberous literary magazines around the country. As the editor of Thicket, an Austin-based literary magazine, he was an important figure in the early years of the Texas small press movement. Born and raised in Dallas, he now lives in his family on the border in South Texas, just a few miles where I grew up. He teaches writing and literature at the University o Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College.
This poem is from his third book, Hook & Bloodline published by Wings Press of San Antonio in 2000.
Heritage
Half Yankee, I listen to these Texan boasts and take what's best to heart: this brazen hope, this wide horizon, this earth, these scattered people - Amerindio-Mexi-Irish-Afro-Europeans tough enough to take on waves of heat and deprivation, conflict, loss, and still to love, and then to die, in camps and shacks and huts and farm houses, in unbridged rivers and deep pine forests, out in open ranch land, by dusty gulleys and fields of wildflowers.
Today we live off the blood of this blazoned landscape, mountan to gulf, hill to bayou, town to city, and joke about seceding and becoming one again an independent nation, our oil and gas all intermixed with stubborn pride and primed by beer or whiskey, forgetting that we chose to give up independence nine years after getting it, quick to call for federal troops to fight a war with Mexico.
Half Texan, I've got snowflakes in my bones, and Whitman's Brooklyn, and salt air off the Sound. On boyhood visits, summers, we prowled the woods behind my cousin's house in Connecticut, no threat of witch or Indian in that greeny labyrinth of time, but we've grown up with other odd shapes of denigration, other righteous spells of devil-making, other victims of our mortal twitching. Quakered, enlightened, revolutionized, my Yankee roots tap deep into a people's fractured independence.
My Uncle Donnie told me of his college days at Amherst, his legendary techer (Robrt Lee Frost, California Yankee by birth, Southern Yankee by name) staring out the window and witn=essing he struggle of spring coming on, the world still unforgiving in its slow unfreezing. Donnie's nerves shattered ten years after his Army duty in World War II, but he held to home and family, puttered around the property, warmed his humor with his daily chilled martinis, and read the Times from front to back, keeping tabs on current trends and public scoundrels.
One cold December day, warmed by a steady pulse of Benny Goodman tunes and the flush of each other's face, my parents met at the USO and canced that night toward love, a Navy ensign from West Texas and a fashion artist from Darien, too close to the whirl of war to ever guess how few of these romances would, like theirs, last more than forty years beyond the quickened courtship, marriage, months or years of separation, and reuniting of near strangers, the youngest daughter of a New York banker and a banking-bitter carpenter's one son.
I look into the eyes of my only son, part Italian, part Tahitian, reading his first books, desperately in love with his mother, dreaming of one day keeping a zoo - he is almost lighter than earth, floating outside of history, heritage, human error. May he tether in time to the trees and rocks of this world, to the names and faces of his heroes, great and small, and to the lives of those whom he will come to love and lose at last, one by one, as a bird's call must finally vanish among the countless atoms in the air.

Not all the poems in the "art" series are downers. Here's one that might even be called "sweet," a word not usually associated with things I write.
What can I say. I'm a slave to the art.
To see the painting, go here:
http://www.bettinasellmann.com/p_2006_dance.htm
first kiss (after Bettina Sellmann's "Dance" - watercolor on canvas)
first kiss shyly offered accepted with eyes cast demurely down
tender
like clouds touching

Kenneth W. Brewer was Poet Laureate of the State of Utah at the time his book Sum of Accidents was published by City Art of Salt Lake City in 2003. This poem is from that book.
At the Surface
I have heard talk about the edge of the universe from a physicist whose imagination skips past his tongue directly to paradigms on a blackboard - the advantage of chalk-talkers over the sermonist of the mount.
And I have heard that some fish communicate by sonar at a depth of ocean where we cannot breathe, where the sun dissipates, sweetens the darkness like a cup of t ea.
And in Russia a few infants swim from the moment of birth, from the watery depth of birth, in a pool with dolphins who nuzzle them like midwives.
Alternately, I cup my ears, dog-paddle, push my lips outward to the edge of that bubbling surface I cannot see.

The next poem is by Michael J. Sottak. I read his work frequently on the Wild Poetry Forum.
As a poet, Michael is something of an outlaw and free spirit. I ask him if he would like to submit a couple of lines of bio information and he sent this:
i was running as fast as i could looking for my ass
Here's his poem.
whore heaven
i was going to revise this but i haven't written it so i'll just tell you about the goddamn lobster feast you know red lobster offering maine losbter my tougue coiling around a buttered tail ... two tails even hotter than god's breath i've got my generic menu in hand a magurieta with ice and salt my penchant to go away from this washed up civilization in hand i want the maine lobster with the garlic shrimp give me cholesterol and tons of butter two aspirin and whisper that you love me the waitress starts laughing and my daughters ask me why i want aspirin it thins the blood and i have a slight pain in my heart... oh Jaja, we don't want you to die i won't tequila and lime thin the blood the waitress brings my lobster tail my two tails are one rock lobster cut in half i point out this is not maine lobster she swears it is goes for the manager sir can i help you probably not this is not maine lobster yes it is no it's not i grew up in new england she turns away runs to the kitchen comes back smiling sir that is maine lobster, but I can get you another, if you'd like. naw, don't bother, it's delicious...
i'd rather buy a franchise

My next poem is by Coleman Barks from his book Gourd Seed published in 1993 by Maypop Books of Athens, Georgia.
Barks published his first book of poetry in 1972 and has continued to write poetry since, though he is primarily known for his translations of the 13th century mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi.
Ornamental Decisions
Where to sit in the sun is the only true question, when not going in to teach, along with how not to feel paranoid they'll find out and fire me.
Under pear-trees full-white nearly hiding teh red and blue uiversity postal kiosk, I choose this bench and this new-heat on my face, instead of talking the history of my fear thus far. Petal-sky overall.
I know who planted these, my friend in the Law School, Milner's wife, June, June and Mr. Forsyth's forsythia, they bolster my floral resolve to write letters in the sun and become a man resembling an Asian Flower opening, with a curved knife in the center.

Taking a break from all the art-inspired poems I've been doing lately, here's a poem I wrote a couple of days ago.
Mr. Miyagi say - wax on; wax off
i had a painterly day - not artist painterly but paint the rent house painterly - and after a day of carrying gallon paint cans, and up and down a ladder, and swishing a brush up and down and side to side, i, who hasn't swished anything heavier than a computer mouse in years of months, am tired sore pooped tuckered wore out toes to nose a certified dump lump ready for the the gulls of landfill manor
and sunburned
it's hard work and i don't know why the professionals don't make more money at it - it's the lowest paid of the apprenticeable trades - but there is joy to it, making the drab bright and colorful, the shopworn old new again, every day leaving something clearly better, prettier nicer than it was when you started the day
there's something to be said for that kind of job satisfaction
and the stilts - holy cow, the stilts
sometimes painters get to wear stilts while they're working, so they can reach high places, you know, without the bother of a ladder
what could be cooler than that

This next piece is by Nikki Giovanni from her book My House published by William Morrow & Company in 1983.
A Certain Peace
It was very pleasant not having you around this afternoon
not that i don't love you and want you and need you and love loving and wantng and needing you
but there was a certain peace when you walked out the door and i knew you would do something you wanted to do and i could run a tub full of water and not worry about answering the phone for your call and soak in bubbles and not worry whether you would want something special for dinner and rub lotion all over me for as long as i wanted and not worry if you had a good idea or wanted to use the bathroom
and there was a certain excitement when aftermidnight you came home and we had coffee and i had a day of mine that made me as happy as yours did you
[ 9 jan 72 ]

My next poet is David Anthony.
David is a British businessman, born in North Wales. He says he lives near London in Stoke Poges close to the church where Gray wrote his "Elegy", a source of much inspiration to him.
He's published two poetry collections: Words to Say in 2002 and Talking to Lord Newborough in 2004. You can see more of his poems by going to his website. Just click on the link on the right.
Passing Through the Woods
It's hard to see my way because the leaves have fallen. Now they're drifting where a path once was - it's hard to see my way. Because the light is brief I dare not pause; I'll find the track somehow. It's hard to see my way because the leaves have fallen now.

Now, here's Wendy Barker, our third Texas poet this week. Unlike the first two, Barker is a transplant. Though born in New Jersey, she lived in the Southwest from a very early age. She received a Bachelors Degree from Arizona State University in 1966 and taught high school in the Phoenix and also in Berkeley while obtaining a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Davis in 1980. She is now Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
This poem is from her book Winter Chickens and Other Poems published in 1990 by Corona Publishing Company of San Antonio.
Three Poems in Dead Winter
1. I wait for birds. Prepared. Old field guide and the new one, slick photographs. All around are tidelands, reeds like giant nests tangling with dried grasses, seeding shrubs. I study the drawings of Goldeneyes, Buffleheads. The water is the color of asphalt. On the surface of this cold pond I can't even see the reflection of my own face.
2. The knife blade is discolored. Bread crumbs clutter the edge, but it cuts clean, cuts and orange right through. The skin splits down to the soft meat, juice, small tendons. Seeds drop to the table, we suck on the half-spheres, leave them, orange, white, empty.
3. Finches land in pairs at the feeder. You can hear small crunchings as they crack covers of seeds. Their tongues are gray like gravel. While their beaks work their heads are upright. Ready to leave.

Here's another of my art inspired poems.
To see the painting, go here:
http://www.guildgreyshkul.com/artist.php?id=114 (seventh painting down)
gone fishing (after Anna Conway's "A Pound of Cure" - oil on panel)
trees line the silvershining pond stretching in reflection
shadows lengthen in the far woods as i close the gate and begin the drive home
i caught no fish today but i did hear the soft rush of a poem pass by
perhaps i'll catch it tomorrow

Here's a neat little poem by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz from the book The Collected Poems of Octavbio Paz.
Pedestrain
He walked among he crowds on the Bouleard Sebasto, thinking about things. A red light stopped him. He looked up: over the gray roofs, silver among the brown birds, a fish flew. The light turned green. As he crossed the street he wondered what he'd been thinking.

Reading Thane Zander is such a lot of fun. Here, have some on me.
Life at the End of the Road
There is a sign at the end of the road. It says "God's Waiting Station - Please Queue Here". I can see the sign now, clear as mud, even though I'm 49/62's of the way down that road. Yes I have my life mapped, I'll happily shuffle off this planet aged 62 jam packed years. I fear not the God part, but queuing displeases me, it's a rather onerous task.
The Jelly Beans counted children at party games reminisce about yesterdays play the tightwad husbands play drinky poos with Beer whilst their wives dish food up.
A lizard scurries across the ceiling, I'm stuck in a hotel room in Singapore, the rain relentless the monsoons bucketing down and flooding a pool so inviting it's a sacrilege no one is out.
I made a pact with God once, if I should be considered worthy I'll pass on the 62 years and go for 70ish, just so I can see children blossom, their lives mapped by happenstance and planning, their mother ripe and healthy at that age too, to see all I need to see. The get out clause at 62 suggests I have options. Plus I still have a novel to write, and a few children's stories to invent.
Jimmy Rasmussen at number 42 (yes the key to Life) plays with Sandy from 18 their games Doctors and Nurses their belief that one day they will most assuredly be Married and having babies of their own, all this at 9 years old, such revelations.
The displaced children of Mumbai chase tourists for a rupee or two money they find so hard to earn in a country where outcastes is the norm.
Yes, 49/62nds down that road. I look back in wonder, how 49 years have slipped past. I'm eagerly awaiting 50, is that possible? At my age I should be counting back. I did once, when I was manic, thought I was 24 when in fact I was 42, yeah, dyslexia. Not to mention dysrhythmia! Today, I melted in a bucket of snow and became a circumspect cluster of non reality.

Here are two short pieces by Peter Reading from his book Marfan.
Reading, resident of Marfa, a small town in West Texas beginning to claim some reputation as a community for artists, writes about the town and the rough West Texas/Davis Mountains/Big Bend territory around it. Reading seems to have a love/hate relationship with the city. While he seems to love the city and the area around it, he seems to hate, or, at least, view with disdain everyone, especially the artists and the like, who moved there after he did. It seems like it might be the "let me in then close the gate" syndrom we see often. But, maybe not.
The book has lots of interesting stuff in it about the city, broken into little pieces of untitled this and that. The best way I know to identify these pieces for you should you ever go off looking for them is to say they the two pieces on page...(well, hell, the pages aren't even numbered). So, I'll describe these two pieces as being on the page about two thirds way through the book.
Here they are.
When Cabeza de Vaca crossed Big Bend in 1535 these mortar-holes in the Cretaceous limestone riverbad shelves, cylindrical deep metates used for grinding grain or mesquite beans, were alrealdy ancient
It is not known what tribe, or if they lived under those smoke-blacked sheer precipitous cliffs, but that each time they pestled seed or legumes their negative memorials deepened some.
*********
Past Boulder Meadow the trail begins to switchback up the South Wall. Beneath the peak it passes between a stand of Bigtooth Maples. You drop into Boot Canyon, residual Arcady, after the heady crest of Pinnacles, eroded stacks, and Pinyoh, Juniper, Oak, sheer steeps down near 8,000 feet below. From Emory you see clear to the Davis Mountains, Marfa and Alpine and a hundred miles into the smog of hapless Mexico.

And here's another of my "art" poems.
To see the painting, go here:
http://www.crggallery.com/artists/andrew-kuo/work/?photo=312
black hole boogie (after Lisa Sanditz' "Pearl Farm Underwater" - acrylic with pearl on canvas)
dancing on the ceiling in a vortex of star- bursts black hole boogie soul train moment flash of disintegration open fategate to universal nothing allthing youthing mething
allallallall
in clouds of megagalictic wonder

Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was in interesting fellow. Born Arkansas and growing up in Oklahoma, he went to New York in 1961 and became an artist, comics illustrator, editor, set designer, as well as costume designer, graphic artist, and gifted writer of books and funny little pieces like these. They are from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.
Van Gogh
Who is Van Gogh? Van Gogh is a famous painter whose paintings are full of inner turmoil and bright colors. Perhaps Van Gogh's most famous painting is "Starry Night": a landscape painting full of inner turmoil and bright colors. There ae many different sides to Van Gogh, the man. When Van Gogh fell in love with a girl who didn't return his love he cut off his ear and gave it to her as a present. It isn't hard to imagine her reaction. Van Gogh's portrait of a mailman with a red beard is probably one of the most sensitive paintings of a mailman ever painted. It is interesting to note that Van Gogh himself had a red beard. When Van Gogh was alive nobody liked his paintings except his brother Theo. Today people flock to see his exibitions. Van Gogh once said of himself: "There is something inside me - What is it?"
Sick Art
Mona Lisa's smile often causes observers to overlook the fact that she has no eyebrows. One skin specialist offered the suggestion that Leonardo de Vinci's model was suffering from a disease called alopicia. Alopicia is a skin disease in which one has no eyebrows. On the other hand, many women in those days shaved their eyebrtows and Leonardo da Vinci's model may have just been fllowing the fad. There is no doubt, howevr, that Rodin's "The Thinker" has bunions on both feet. Today, with modern art, it is not to easy to spot diseases and physical dis- orders. Many doctors, however, have noticed a strong relationship between variious skin diseases and the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Fungus infections are very common in the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Art
Looking through a book of drawings by Holbein I realize several moments of truth. A nose (a line) so nose-like. So line-like. And then I think to myself "so what?" It's not going to solve any of myh problems. And then I realize that at the very moment of appreciation I had no problems. Then I decide that this is a pretty profound thought. And that I ought to write it down. This is what I have just done. But it doesn't sound so profound anymore. That's art for you.

Here is a terrific piece by Alice Folkart, one of her very best, I think. The first stanza just blows me away.
Stutter at the Edge of the World
There's a stutter at the edge of the world, right where the oceans pour over into night and bright the planets skip across the pond.
In the other room colors gossip and I ask pointlessly, where does God sit? I knew all along that he would be out.

Now, for the last poem for the week, here's another "art" piece from me. This is my second poem from a Kozik painting. I did the first one week before last.
To see this painting, go here:
http://www.vandeb.com/artists_kozik.html#
she pretends after K.K. Kozik's "Late" - oil on linen
she pretends she hasn't been waiting
she pretends to be fascinated by the Times and it's reports on the hows whys and wherefors of Hill and Barry and Britney as well
but as she looks over her shoulder at me I know better
the flowers were a good idea i think

As the time for a tender good-bye approaches, I wanted to mention some recent stats on "Here and Now."
In March, we got 13,300 hits on the site, our biggest month since we started a couple of years ago. Now the truth is, I don't have a clue what a "hit" exactly (or, even, roughly) is, but 13,000 of them seems like a whole bunch of those little dogies so I'm pleased.
I'm in employment mode probably through late May. Dealing with that, plus some overhanging rental property issues, not to mention real life, has kept and will continue to keep me busier than I want to be. So, keep checking in with us every week for new poetry, pictures and stuff, but give us so slack if the issue become a little smaller and a little later in appearing.Typos and mis-spellings are also a possibility.
In the meantime, remember, all of the material used in this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself is produced by and is the property of me...allen itz
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Allen, Busy week last week, but I wanted to stop and say how much I like the sepia prints in this blog. The frames around each, coupled with the monochromatic scale make them almost look as though they are taken with one of the old Brownie cameras and then changed from grayscale to brown. Lovely and well-fitting this week's theme.
Marie Gail
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